Starship Asterisk*

The outback of Australia is brighter than the rest of the country - yet effectively no one lives there. Consider the lights of Perth and Adelaide (each about 1M people) and Melbourne (4-5M) all outshone by a ton of places in Western Australia and Northern Territories. Something must be wrong there ...

Does anyone have any explanations for the two oddball items near the top-centre in this image? First, there is a fractured ball that has lines crossing it, top-left to bottom right. If this was a photo from on earth, I would have immediately concluded that it was part of a spider's web. I can't see ...

The scenes near the start with silhouetted rocks that lighten to show yellow / orange sands with sandstone pillars are almost definitely at a location called The Pinnacles on the coastal sand-dunes inland from Grey in Western Australia - roughly 100 miles NNW of Perth. Google Earth has some good ima...